The air would still be too thin to breathe. Eventually (long after surface life had died), solar radiation would break atmospheric water into oxygen, which would react with carbon on the Earth to form carbon dioxide. If the Earth stopped spinning suddenly, the atmosphere would still be in motion with the Earth's original 1100 mile per hour rotation speed at the equator. If you’re any given distance away from a conglomeration of matter, it doesn’t make much difference how that matter is arranged. Mars acts as a slingshot and hurtles the asteroids towards Earth. If the Earth stopped spinning, the magnetic field would disappear leaving us unprotected against the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation and deadly solarwinds. The Sun, exerting its huge gravity on this anomaly, pulls the asteroid towards it. The Earth is traveling around the Sun with an orbital velocity of 30 kilometers per second.This is exactly the speed it needs to be going to counteract the force of gravity from the Sun pulling it inward. Also, as light from the Sun takes eight and a half minutes to reach us, we’d have a final few moments of glorious sunshine before our planet was bathed in darkness. An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013 Nasa For … This means rocks, topsoil, trees, buildings, your pet dog, and so on, would be swept away into the atmosphere. That’s well before the sun is expected to swell into a red giant and consume us in its death throes roughly 5.4 billion years from now. For starters, Earth would now take a whole year to do what it pulls off in a day: cycle from night to day and back. The lack of atmosphere would chill the Earth's surface. For example, if the Sun were to collapse into a black hole (), all of the planets would continue to orbit around it in exactly the same way (just colder). Length of Day The length of a year doesn’t change since Earth still rotates around the sun, however if Earth ceased to spin, each day and night would last six months. On the plus side, our planet retains heat rather well, so we wouldn’t freeze to death instantly. Even though these asteroids may fly by with several million miles to spare, Mars does increase the probability of Earth-bound asteroids. Here, Mars’ gravity comes into play. When a Mars-size object collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago, it knocked off a chunk that would become the moon. However, if Earth stopped spinning gradually, what it accomplishes in a single day might eventually take a year to complete; countries on the side facing the sun would experience daylight for 6 months, while those living on the side facing away from the sun would experience a six-month night. Of course, for us on Earth, the consequences would be pretty dire. All of the land masses would be scoured clean of anything not attached to bedrock.